William Blake and the Imagination in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature.”
  2. “Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a better time–Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say–that they have troubled the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world, instead of believing that all beautiful things have ‘lain burningly on the Divine hand.'”
  3. “He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live–lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times.”
  4. “In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.”
  5. “But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely when one reads the Songs of Innocence, or the lyrics he wished to call ‘The Ideas of Good and Evil,’ but when one reads those ‘Prophetic Works’ in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him.”